Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 8-7-2020

Volume

2

Issue

1

Abstract

Doxastic feel like is used to convey a belief or opinion, similar to think:

(1) I feel like your drawing is better than mine.

Doxastic feel like is an intriguing topic of study due to the potential for microsyntactic variation, along with the thick web of linguistic prejudice surrounding this construction. Doxastic feel like is primarily associated with stereotypes regarding age, gender, and intelligence. A survey was conduced to measure participants of diverse demographic backgrounds in their acceptability of feel like in different contexts. Overall, respondents were found to have high acceptability of this construction. In addition, respondents were probed for the gender, age, and intelligence stereotypes they may hold regarding speakers of feel like. Survey results conform with general public opinion that feel like is tied to people of younger age and can be seen as a marker of lower intelligence. In addition, an instance of microsyntactic variation is exhibited by some speakers, in which two complementizer-like elements appear:

(2) I feel like that your drawing is better than mine.

While the feel like that construction is encountered often in social media posts and radio shows, the respondents of this survey had low overall acceptability of the feel like that construction, and tied it to someone who may be a non-native speaker or someone of lower intelligence. This study furthers our exploration of the interaction between microsyntactic variation, linguistic prejudice, and grammatical diversity through the study of doxastic feel like.

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